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What Happens When Your TV Goes Blank? |
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Paul Almeida, president of the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees, points out that even though millions of people do not have the capacity to receive digital television, Congress blocked bills that would have delayed the switch from analog.
On Feb. 17, 2009, millions of America’s workers and their families, including rural, low-income and elderly citizens, will be left with blank TV screens. Don’t call the repairman. Contact your members of Congress.
Feb. 17 is the date that television stations stop using analog signals to broadcast and switch to digital. If you have an analog TV set and use an antenna or rabbit ears, you must buy a converter box, a digital TV or subscribe to cable or satellite service to receive programming—at a time when the public has fewer resources than ever to buy the necessary equipment.
The government has run out of the federally subsidized coupons to help pay for the converter box—and there still are millions of people on the waiting list.
In recent weeks, there were attempts by Congress to delay the transition to digital. But the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce failed twice in the past week to approve a digital TV (DTV) delay bill. House officials agreed on Jan. 26 to put the previously passed Senate version up for a vote. That vote was scratched on Jan. 27 but back on Jan. 28. That day, House Republicans defeated delaying the DTV deadline four months by a vote of 258-168.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration cannot tell accurately how many homes will lose TV reception on Feb. 17. Conservative estimates say more than 2 million.
If your screen goes blank, remember why—and e-mail your members of Congress here.
2 Comments
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Actually, I think doing w/out TV at home would be good for a lot people. Its has been for me.
“What Happens When Your TV Goes Blank?”
For millions of brain-washed working people, it could be the start of mental liberation!
Nowhere on commercial television or on the so-called Public Broadcasting System (better named the Privatized B.S.) will you see a nightly news program “of, by and for” working people. Instead of news on the economic concerns of working people, you will hear the instead the news and opinions that Wall Street and and anti-labor corporate interests WANT YOU TO THINK AND BELIEVE.
Thus forever unending WAR ON TERRORISM (war for oil and profit) is forever justified, even though the funding for these wars are bankrupting the public sector (public schools, health care, etc.) critically essential for economic survival of working people.
THERE NO PROGRAM ON TELEVISION OR RADIO OR IN ANY NEWSPAPER DEDICATED TO PROMOTING THE INTEREST OF WORKING PEOPLE. Every newspaper has a “business section” or a “Money” section, with stock market quotes, profiles of the millionaires and billionaires and how they “worked for” (read: exploited, robbed, moved to China, etc.) for their vast fortunes.
WHY HASN’T THE LABOR MOVEMENT DEMANDED EQUAL TIME ON PBS WITH THEIR OWN NIGHTLY NEWS AND INFORMATION PROGRAM??
Nothing will change until the millions of working people learn the “facts of life” under this gangster capitalism. As it is, the “ignorance” of working people is “bliss” for the corporate ruling elite. But corporate managed “ignorance is death” for working people, who end up blaming themselfes for not being “successful”.
I rember in the 1950s in Chicago their was a radio station that was called the “Voice of Labor”. That voice has been silent for too many years! Thus most working people KNOW NOTHING about what is happening to them! NOT FROM STUPIDITY BUT FROM ENFORCED IGNORANCE (not knowing).
One source of information (on the internet) as to WHY the economy is collapsing, WHY we are always in phony wars, WHY both existing parties (Democrats and Republicans) are destroying working people in the U.S. and world wars: the daily World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org
Also check out: LabourStart
“Where trade unionists start their day on the net.” http://www.labourstart.org/
LabourStart has extensive daily news from many countries and languages.
The same exploitation and destruction is being inflicted upon working people throughout the world by multi-national corporations and global capitalism.